Best Local Actor

Versatility doesn’t seem strong enough a word to describe Andrew Benator. He was so convincing as the meek and nebbishy Dollar Store manager in the Alliance’s January production of Good People that it came as a complete shock to see him walk onto stage as the smug, vicious writer Leonard in Seminar at Actor’s Express a few months later. As the protagonist’s boss Stevie in Good People, he provided a complicated, troubled, almost haunted portrayal of the tension in the character’s moral dilemma about being the cog in the machine that will crush his beleaguered employee. His Leonard in Seminar, on the other hand, was a messy haze of bad moods and solipsistic fits, as if he lived to crush others. Both performances were notable in their own right, but considered side by side they revealed Benator’s impressive artistic agility. www.andrewbenator.com. less...

An Atlanta actor and improv comedian for years, Dan Triandiflou achieved some hysterical career highs in 2012. His uproarious turn as a high-strung country club golfer in Aurora Theatre’s The Fox on the Fairway, a showcase of superb slapstick, only served as a warm-up for The Revengeance. In the strenuous two-man show with the equally inexhaustible Kevin Gillese of Dad’s Garage, Triandiflou approximated the comedic equivalent of a chameleon on fast-forward, alternating from sea captains to tough cops to John Malkovich and showing the kind of comedic timing that can segue from over-the-top mania to laid-back calm within the same sentence. less...

You might not guess that ED HELMS hails from Atlanta. Helms has specialized in the kind of swaggering false confidence that seems to define this country’s modern media, only carried to comic extremes. You imagine Helms-like characters as being cloned in factories to be America’s middle managers and cable-news pundits, and not actually coming from real hometowns. Whether playing pugnacious dimwit Andy Bernard as a regular on NBC’s hit sitcom “The Office” or practicing “fake” journalism on “The Daily Show” and as Ed Carson in Evan Almighty, Helms perfectly captures our own worst instincts with unerring humor. Every time he breaks into a piercing rendition of, say, “Closer to Fine” or “Zombie,” he does us proud. less...

You might not guess that ED HELMS hails from Atlanta. Helms has specialized in the kind of swaggering false confidence that seems to define this country’s modern media, only carried to comic extremes. You imagine Helms-like characters as being cloned in factories to be America’s middle managers and cable-news pundits, and not actually coming from real hometowns. Whether playing pugnacious dimwit Andy Bernard as a regular on NBC’s hit sitcom “The Office” less...

We’ve grown used to the seemingly effortless ability of DANIEL MAY to give raw, energetic performances as love-struck leading men, self-important artists and quirky comic roles, like his word-obsessed lighthouse keeper in Actor’s Express’ “The Wooden Breeks” last spring. But he rose to a higher creative level as the tormented son Biff in Georgia Shakespeare Festival’s “Death of a Salesman”, persuasively demonstrating that the play is as much Biff’s tragedy as his father’s. less...

For years, Brad Sherrill has been one of Atlanta’s most reliable and versatile performers, equally comfortable at portraying zany comedy, gay angst and ingenue romance (the latter most recently in the Georgia Shakespeare Festival’s Western-style “As You Like It”). But 2001 has seen him take his talent to another level with his one-man performance of “The Gospel of John”, a rich, fully dimensioned exploration of the New Testament text that you can appreciate no matter what faith you happen to have. less...